A Journey in Brazil in 1865–66

Although having only traveled between her family's summer home near her native Boston prior to her marriage to the scientist Louis Agassiz, Elizabeth Agassiz proved herself an intrepid expedition member and acute observer of life in Brazil when she accompanied her husband there from 1865-72. Katherine Manthorne recounts Elizabeth Agassiz' crucial contributions to knowledge about 19th-century Brazil's natural and cultural circumstances.

Although the Venice Biennale still allots discrete pavillions to individual nations, Ana Laura Esposito reports that, in a culturally diverse world where people are constantly on the move, more of the artists in the Biennale are creating work that questions and transcends political borders.

Katherine Manthorne relates the adventures of a groundbreaking traveler artist, Maria Sibyla Merian. With her magnum opus, The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam, published in 1705, Merian left an unparalleled verbal and visual record of of indigenous insects that she and her daughter, Dorothea Graff, studied and described while traveling in Surinam, also known as Dutch Guiana.

Sandra Pinardi discusses three photographers—Claudio Perna, Paolo Gasparini, and Alfredo Cortina—whose work transcends what Vilem Flusser has characterized as the production of “technical images” to produce images that subvert photography’s assumed documentary function and reinvent the medium.

Using Frederic Edwin Church’s mid-nineteenth century painting of Cotopaxi, Alberto Baraya takes us on a disorienting “future voyage” to the famous Ecuadorian volcano in which he advocates for expedition-as-art.

Traveling in Chile and Brazil in the early nineteenth century, Maria Graham distinguished herself as a naturalist, diarist, and artist, bringing her first-hand visual and verbal accounts of her journeys to a fascinated audience back home in England. Art historian Katherine Manthorne provides an overview of Graham's remarkable accomplishments.

In this third installment, Dennis Carr, the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, speaks about how the CPPC’s gift of colonial works from Venezuela will be contextualized within the 53 galleries of the Museum's celebrated Art of the Americas Wing.

Viceregal Art in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

In this second installment in a series, Rosario Granados, the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Associate Curator of Spanish Colonial Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, writes about how the CPPC’s gift of colonial objects that were made to be used in acts of private devotion coincides with an important long-term loan...

In this first installment in a series, Jorge Rivas, the Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum, describes how the CPPC’s gift of paintings, furniture and objects, mostly from Venezuela, will help to round out the Denver Art Museum’s renowned collection of Spanish colonial art.

Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros & Olana in dialogue in the exhibition OVERLOOK

Traveler artists who worked in Latin America in the 17th to 19th centuries are often thought of as belonging to discrete national schools. Art historian Katherine Manthorne discusses the ways in which their work in fact occupies a more expansive and fluid internationality.

Nine videos from the 1970s and 80s by Jaime Davidovich—an Argentine-American video/television-art pioneer— that were discussed in the CPPC’s recent Conversaciones/Conversations book about the artist are available to view on our website in full. They are accompanied by excerpts from Davidovich’s conversation with Daniel R. Quiles about the individual works.

A Document and Meditation

Sandra Pinardi identifies “gray works” as works of art situated on a borderland that blurs the line between poetry and document, theory and aesthetic expression, and the subjective personal gesture and objective scientific research. Through selected examples from contemporary art, Pinardi elaborates upon the complexity and multivalence of “gray works” and their interconnections...